Monday, October 25, 2010

Angle uses decoy to duck press

Running for the U.S. Senate is very serious business. If you’re a candidate for this esteemed office, you need to be accountable to the public. And that means meeting with reporters along the way.

Sharron Angle seems to have forgotten this important point.

Angle, the Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for Senate hopes to unseat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in Nevada. She has suffered, from time-to-time, foot-in-mouth disease during this campaign. The last example was when she made decidedly insensitive remarks to a group of Latino students. Something about not being able to tell them apart from Asian youth.

Since then, Angle has refused to talk to reporters. Today, she took things further.

Angle, the Huffington Post reports, used a decoy to mislead reporters so she could make her escape from an event at a Microsoft licensing office.

It’s not the first time she ducked the press. She did it in July in Reno as well.

This is not just a closely watched race. It’s a close race. Polls have put Angle and Reid in a statistical dead heat. So their respective positions on the issues are of utmost concern to the voters.

But Angle seems to not care.

Perhaps she is frightened that she may make another stupid comment. No question, if she did, the reporters would gleefully quote her.

But if she can’t handle a gaggle of reporters in Nevada, how is she going to handle the tough issues and questions that will come her way if she’s elected?

There’s one week now before the midterm election. That’s not much time for undecided voters – you know, the one’s that will ultimately determine the outcome of this election – to make up their minds. Angle owes it to them to be forthcoming. Ducking reporters like an accused criminal trying to avoid the glare of camera lights during a “perp walk” isn’t the kind of impression a candidate for Senate should be giving voters. In all likelihood, her actions today hurt her more than they helped.